Proteas thrash West Indies to claim series victory and get Bavuma's captaincy off to a good start

The Proteas claimed their fifth successive Test win against the West Indies, getting the Temba Bavuma captaincy era off to the perfect start here on Saturday afternoon. 

 The size of the victory was comprehensive — 284 runs — but it was a performance that demanded tenacity especially with the bat in the second innings.  

Nothing illustrated the Proteas’ desire more than their captain’s performance on Friday.  

Bavuma turned this Test decisively his team’s way with an innings that will rank among the best by a Proteas batter.  

For large swathes of his 376 minutes at the crease Bavuma was just trying to keep the West Indies at bay and when he eventually found a partner in Wiaan Mulder on Friday afternoon, the tide quickly turned.  

Coming less than a week after he’d bagged a pair in the first Test it was another display of his remarkable toughness and that such a performance comes so early in his captaincy tenure sets him up perfectly for the next few years.  

Thanks to Bavuma’s 172, South Africa was able to set the West Indies 391 to win on Saturday, a target that was always going to be difficult, on a surface that was breaking up, and which at one end was starting to keep low.  

It didn’t take Kagiso Rabada long to get among the tourists as he dismissed Kraigg Brathwaite for the fourth time in a row.  

Given his importance to the batting, the West Indies captain’s series aggregate of 46 runs was a poor return.  

He and opener Tagenarine Chanderpaul couldn’t provide the kind of starts that would allow a talented but shaky middle order some breathing room.  

Rabada and the Proteas spinners, Simon Harmer and Keshav Maharaj blew away the batting in an hour before lunch on Saturday.  

By the interval the tourists were 34/6, with the only trouble for South Africa that they’d lost Keshav Maharaj to an injury picked up in extremely unusual circumstances.  

The left-arm spinner appeared to be hurt his left achilles heel when celebrating the wicket of Kyle Mayers, collapsing to the ground in anguish and needing to be taken off the field on a stretcher, before being put straight into an ambulance and taken to a nearby hospital for an MRI scan. 

Fortunately for the Proteas, who were also without Wiaan Mulder who had a bruised hand, the West Indies batting was so bad that it wasn’t going to cause them too much hassle.  

Gerald Coetzee stormed through the West Indies tail to finish matters off midway through the afternoon session as they were bowled out for 106. He finished with 3/34 while Harmer claimed 3/46. 

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